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Ford Q1 profits dragged down by warranty costs

General Motors isn't the only Detroit automaker posting falling profits in the first quarter. Ford just released its Q1 2014 financial data, and it reported a net income of $989 million, down $622 million from Q1 2013. The drop is partially blamed on higher warranty and recall expenses than the company had anticipated.
Financially, Ford suffered a rough quarter almost across the board. Its pre-tax profit of $1.4 billion was also down $765 million from a year ago. Things were even worse in the North American market where operating profit fell significantly to $1.5 billion, down from $2.392 billion in Q1 2013. However, its global revenue ticked up slightly to $35.9 billion, from $35.6 billion in this period in 2013.
Ford admitted that it spent about $900 million on expenses that it hadn't planned for during this quarter. According to Reuters, the company paid about $400 million in additional warranty and recall costs in North America. The automaker didn't explain why the costs were so much higher than expected. However, in the last three months, Ford has had several recalls, including on the 2001-2004 Escape for rust, Explorer for its steering, Edge for its fuel line and others.

Bill Ford wins National Pond Hockey Championship with employees

Who says executives aren't people? This past weekend, Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, and a group of employees trekked up to Eagle River, WI for a few games of pond hockey. Team Ford took part in the 2014 Labatt Blue/USA Pond Hockey Championship, capturing its fifth title in the 50+ Tier 1 Division.
"It feels great to win," Ford, who plays on the team alongside other Ford employees, told the USA Hockey website. "It was fun to play [River Valley Pioneers] because they're great guys and we play them every year. We finally beat them, which we were due. It was a very clean game, a tough game."
The FoMoCo team managed to score seven goals to River Valley's two, and went undefeated in all five of its games during the tourney. Take a look below for the official press release on Team Ford's win.

How Ford hid the 2015 Mustang from spy photographers

Now that we've finally seen the 2015 Ford Mustang, it's fun to go back and look at the spy shots we spent months pouring over, trying to dissect what was under all the camouflage. For the most part, Ford did a good job of concealing the car from spy photographers, and it released a video showing how much work went into doing so.
As crude as the Mustang's camo looked, all of the hard plastic, foam, vinyl and ratchet straps were actually created and put in place by a specific design team. The whole idea was to hide the car's identity, but it certainly ended up acting as a magnet for attention, too. According to Ford's press release, it took less than an hour for spy shots to appear online after the car was taken on public roads for the very first time - this is likely in reference to our first official spy shots of the Mustang from June, shown in the gallery below.
Scroll down for a press release and video, which shows footage of the 2015 Ford Mustang testing with minimal camouflage. This is probably the same track session where we got our first look at the Mustang's face back in August.